A Case for the President's Plan

Gone from the hustle of bureaucracy, and comfortable again in academe, Daniel Patrick Moynihan sat in his Cambridge study recently and talked with TIME Correspondent Gregory Wierzynski about the Family Assistance Plan, which he helped to devise, and persuaded the President to adopt:

WHEN the President proposed the Family Assistance Plan in August 1969, he did not propose to improve the existing system. He proposed to replace it. What we have now is a system of income support that places a great premium upon dependency. If you are flat-ass busted, helpless, the system comes in and helps you; but if you are on the margin of trying to make it, the system does not help you at all.

Why are so many in need of welfare in so rich a country as this? I don't know and don't know anybody who does, but I can offer a partial answer. Wealth and poverty have a certain connection. As we have rushed ahead toward more efficient systems of production, we have been pretty careless about the people who got left behind in the process. I remember, in the early Kennedy years when attention was focused on Appalachia, writing speeches for the Secretary of Labor saying that we had the cheapest coal in the world because we had the cheapest coal miners.

Most of the problem of dependency in America today is the byproduct of a defunct system of Southern agriculture. It has been a kind of fly-now, pay-later arrangement, only the bills come due not in Mississippi but in Chicago. A lot of persons in Chicago ask, reasonably enough, in what way they are responsible and why they should pay.

The second fact, almost certainly, is that we started up a system of welfare in the 1930s that is simply destructive. It hurts the people who get it more than the people who pay for it. Given the present system, the richer we get, the more dependency we probably should expect.

It is probably true that there is a band of income below which people are not really much help to themselves: they don't have enough to save, they don't have enough to think forward, they just live from day to day. When you move through that band, you become very much interested in taking care of the future--saving, being careful, looking after yourself. That's what it means to have a $12,000 house and be earning $9,000 a year. The argument of family assistance is to move away from welfare altogether, to abolish welfare in effect, and to say what the President has said: "We'll place a floor under the income of every family with children. The assistance will not be based on dependency; we will help all families who are below a certain income level." Obviously that level is an issue of judgment.

The Family Assistance Plan is not a liberal or conservative kind of solution; it is pragmatic. I like the term pragmatic; it says, what does it mean to be poor? To be poor means not to have enough money. And how do you help people who are poor? You give them more money. Particularly, you try to deal with the very large number of people all over the country who in fact work, who try to raise their kids, but who just don't make enough. Who are they? They are the people who are in the backwaters of the economy--on small marginal farms where there just is not enough to take a living out of the soil any more. They are people who get sick and don't work for six months of the year. They are people who are dependent on seasonal types of industry. They are people who are not very skilled, who can't produce a lot, people of low intelligence.

What family assistance does is provide income as a matter of right, not as a matter of judgment, of whether you are worthy of getting it. It does not mean that a county commissioner of welfare likes the Wierzynskis and thinks that they are good Polish stock and they can be depended on and does not like the Moynihans and thinks that they are a bunch of drunken Irish. It is nobody's business. Your income comes as a matter of right, and therefore it enhances your dignity.

The one thing no one wishes is for this legislation to be enacted in the atmosphere of someone-is-to-blame--for no one is to blame. Everything that has happened has happened out of decent practices, but it did not turn out very well. Why have welfare at all? You might say we do it because we always have. For some persons, there are clear religious or ethical mandates to care for those in need. For most of us, I think, it is simply instinctual behavior: we look after our own. In a good country your own includes a lot of people. It includes everybody.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.